Hi all, I am planning on using GP on a Surface Pro 6 as a backup solution for my live setup. I am having great fun playing with it and VSTs…something I have only barely dabbled with in the past.
Anyway, I use Omnisphere, Keyscape and Serum predominantly but occasionally get pops & crackles through my Audio with Keyscape.
However, I recently added ikmultimedia’s Hammond B-3x VST and the pops and crackles have gotten worse.
I’ve read everything I can find online and tried all the fixes and suggestions I can… played with sample rate (44.1k seems to be optimal), buffer size (256 again seem optimal) and even adjusted the registry to optimize power settings… all to no avail. Typically I see CPU usage in the low teens (11%…16%) but with B-3X the CPU usage jumps to 41% minumum and when playing can hit 46%. The rack I am using only has the B-3X VST loaded.
Any thoughts? I apologize if this has been covered and solved elsewhere… if it has I just haven’t been able to find it.
Interesting David-san, I will look through it. Thank you for the link.
Incidentally I forgot to mention that the Midi/USB/Audio interface I am using is an NI Komplete Audio 6 mk2.
IK Multimedia Hammond B-3x is THE most intensive CPU organ plugin out there, so I’m not all that surprised your surface pro can’t handle it without pops at your current buffer size. If the pops go away when you raise the sample size up to 512 and higher, then you know that your surface pro can’t handle the intense processing load of that plugin without significant latency.
Although there are some things you can do to improve performance on a Mac, it’s much less of an issue mostly because the operating system has very good built-in support for audio and MIDI already.
Hi David-san
I’ve read most of Brad Robinsons book and there were a few things in it that I hadn’t tried. I’ve just finished the updates and have to say so far it seems to be working… I’ll follow up in a few days with a more definitive result. I have written a specific document, partly copying some stuff specific to what I did from Brad’s book but also including some information I obtained elsewhere that seems to be specific to the Microsoft Surface Pro 6 that might be useful to others attempting to operate on a Surface. How do I upload this?
Once again, thanks a million for the heads up on the book… really a very generous and helpful thing to do and it’s really appreciated.
At my point of view, the Technology and driver of the Audiointerface is an important factor.
I prefer RME Audiointerfaces, due to exzellent drivers !
USB versus Thunderbolt
Interface with/without DPC
Do you have enough memory, wlan and Bluetooth disabled…
I use a Surface Pro 6 also, but mine is my main machine. I’d like to read your extra optimizing thoughts when they are up loaded. Molten Music did an extensive amount of testing for audio production on the SP6, and he (Robin Molten) published his results late 2018 on his YT page. It’s worth watching. His testing lead him to the conclusion that the SP6 is perfectly fine for music making. I followed recommendations on this forum and bought an RME Babyface Pro and have had absolutely no regrets whatsoever. It performs beautifully whenever I use it. However, it occasionally causes some static if Windows is being ornery (which it does of its own free will from time to time), but a Win reboot always clears that up. Re organ vst - a lot of people here recommend Blue 3. I myself fell in love with VB3 a while back and use it because the built in rotary sounds so good to my ears. Even better than V2 which I also have.
Looking for to reading your thoughts when up loaded.
I am not sure, if this is the whole trooth…
Perhaps you know that RME is using its own USB driver. And this is such important for Jitter handling and even for optimizing the chipset handling…
And if you did follow the driver Development of RME, no other vendor develop such improved drivers…
I am aware of this believe me. They even develop their own USB hardware not only the software. At the time I bought my RME I HAD TO use my audio interface on USB3 which supposed is to be compatible with USB2. However most candidates failed to use USB3. I remember that at the end I still had two candidates in front of me: an RME UCX and an Audient for half the price. And after double “blind” audio tests, RME finished to kill me with the quality of the sound when playing a piano.
So, I am more than convinced by RME. But at the end their fabulous driver has sometimes to run on a PC, and that NEEDS an optimization for audio which seems to be quite useless on Mac if I take the Mac users feedback into account.
But fortunately for users who cannot afford even a used RME audio interface, GP runs perfectly with many other brands nowadays.
Hi all
at last I have some time to get this done. Here is a document that I put together describing how I overcame my Pops and Crackling issue with GP. My setup is a Midi Keyboard (a MOXF 8 in this case) connected through a Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6 mk2 which is connected through a Powered Manhattan USB hub to the MS Surface Pro 6. This process I describe has been taken in part from various other sources and I thank everyone for the information they have provided. This configuration works beautifully for me and since configuring things in the way I describe I have had no issues. Apologies for the format… I am unable to upload the PDF so instead attached are three PNG files.
Hi djogon… I keep getting the message saying “…the file is not authorized. Authorized extensions: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, mp4, gig, rackspace, gppanel, zip)”… see attached.
Hi, Attached my Glitch Free setup/configuration for a Surface Pro 6 and NI Komplete Audio 6 mk2. See my description above. Surface Pro 6 Glitch Free.zip (1.2 MB)
